"We're taking a radically different approach to that problem," he tells CNN. "It's something we wanted to take more time to do it right." Instead, Rigopulos says that the team at Harmonix is focused on community and other unspecified areas.

Harmonix bigwigs have gone on record in the past, saying that using user-created and custom track technology — as is done is Harmonix's iPod game Phase — may be applied to Rock Band in the future.

Get ready to jam with 'Rock Band 2' [CNN - thanks, Max!]

While this is precisely the news that all Rock Band fans have been waiting to hear, it raises a ton of new questions. Is $14.99 the new standard album price? And how often can we expect new albums? Luckily, we had the chance to discuss the announcement with Harmonix's CEO Alex Rigopulos, who was more than happy to answer all of our fanboy questions. We posted an abridged, cleaned (sans-Mark's-question-stuttering-and-boring-parts) Q&A after the jump.

What took you so long?
...a big reason that it's taken us so long to get them to market is that the actual technical delivery of the assets required for any one song - they're actually pretty complicated. You're often dealing with masters for the older stuff that were recorded on analog. Often it takes a long time to even locate those masters. The right takes and the right edits have to be found, and in some cases old gear that's not in use anymore has to be resuscitated to transfer the stuff to digital. And so for any one song, the actual process of finding the right tape, resuscitating it and transferring it to the right digital format that we need and all that is an undertaking...

If you're just going for a handful of tracks by a particular artist and they're slow to locate one of them, well you just pick a different track and go on. Well when you're looking for a dozen tracks ina a particular album, you cant really release the album until you've tracked every one of those assets.

What happened to The Who?
We will have a specific announcement about that coming up soon regarding some work that we have coming down the pike with The Who in general that I think people are gonna be pretty happy about...and in general what you're gonna see sorta deep dives with particular artists, where with some artists...of the appropriate stature, you'll see us doing more than whole albums, potentially even entire catalogs.

What kind of schedule will album release be on?
For album releases, in particular, there isn't a set schedule like an album a month...we do want to release albums regularly...generally, the amount of content we release in a week you'll see growing over the course of the year substantially.

Will albums ever represent the majority of your music releases?
I don't think albums will be the dominant release. I don't think we're going to switch to primarily releasing albums, but I will say, in addition to these three we've just mentioned, we actually have MANY in the pike...suffice it to say, it will be a substantial portion of our content offering going forward.

So is $14.99 the new standard album price?
It's not a standard. There's not going to be a standard album pricing. It's going to be a function of how many songs are included in the album...essentially there will be a volume discount applied.

Do you think a variable price rate on albums is disadvantage, especially when stores like iTunes sell albums for a flat rate?
Perhaps, but I think...consumers have demonstrated that they feel that the value they're getting for a game level based at $2 is enormous...[and] there's quite a lot of appetite for music at $2 a song...[so] volume discounts for more music represents quite a good value for the consumers.

Will you ever offer 3-Pack discounts for album tracks?
At this time we're not...I'm not ruling that out as something we're doing in the future. It's just not something we're doing right now.

Would you ever consider releasing "greatest hits" albums?
I don't see any particular reason why we would rule them out...I think that for the right artist under the right circumstances, there's no reason we wouldn't consider doing a greatest hits album that either exists in the world already as a recorded compilation, or [as] in some cases, we've actually had artists come to us who are interested in kind of curating their own new greatest hits compilation for the purpose of Rock Band release. And so I think we're really pretty versatile to ideas of that sort.

So basically, a Rock Band Greatest Hits album?
Exactly.
(Ed note: Rigopulos later explained that they kind of did this with Grateful Dead tracks already, unofficially.)

At the end of the interview, Rigopulos let me know that Rock Band had recently surpassed 8 million song downloads. That's about 2 million just since their new store opened (and Still Alive became offered for free).

Rigopulos says:

We're going to be able to export to your web pages, and from there you'll be able to take your band avatars, pose them, create album covers with your band logo and different scenes with your avatars. And then you'll be able to turn that into real world stuff. For example, figurines based upon your Rock Band avatars, t-shirts with your fake band's album art and your tour dates on the back from your accomplishments within the game, bumper stickers, old records, things like that. Really cool real-world merchandise based on this fictitious band that you've created in the game.

Finally, some clutter I can get behind! Add that to a library of tunes that Rigopulos hopes to have in the thousands and the $180 buy-in isn't starting to sound like the expensive part. Simply oodles more details on the game over at OXM.

Rock Band's Alex Rigopulos: The OXM Interview [OXM]

On the single player Career Mode front, Rigopulos confirmed that each music discipline would feature a different career defining song. The drum career mode will, for example end with the Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again" but the guitar career mode will cap off with something totally different.

For downloadable content, Harmonix is looking to release music without "radio edit" versions, issuing downloadable content that may deviate from the game's T-rating due to explicit language.

The Harmonix president also confirmed the wired and wireless situation for each instrument. For all versions, the microphone and drum kits will be wired. On the PLAYSTATION 3 edition, wireless guitars will be available. And, as specified earlier, the Xbox 360 SKU will ship bundles with wired guitar controllers, but wireless controllers will be available. And while the PS3 is USB ready, sporting four USB ports standard, Xbox 360 gamers won't be left cold, as Harmonix plans on including a USB hub for a full rock suite.

Even more details are available in the full OXM podcast.

KOXM Episode 79 [OXM Podcast]

So what could potentially make Rock Band the uber-music game? Harmonix are not only ambitiously planning for hundreds of downloadable songs and hope to include MIDI support for electronic drum kits, they're "actively considering the possibility" of eventually creating tools to allow gamers to import user-created music into the game. Since Rigopulos is very cautious about that, admitting that it won't make it in Rock Band "out of the gate" I'll just pray they pull it off.

IGN has the full interview and first screenshots at the link below. Go. Now. Michael McWhertor

Rock Band Blowout [IGN]